David Kamerer

Associate Professor of Communication, Loyola University Chicago

Just one bad moment

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We’ve all had one. That moment you wish you could take back. Maybe you were impatient with your child, a colleague, or a loved one. Perhaps you laughed at someone’s expense. Or uncorked some profanity in an inappropriate situation.

You know why you did it. You were tired, you had had enough, you weren’t really thinking, you had a few drinks, you were just careless. You thought you were safe.
There’s nothing new about the one bad moment. What’s new is the omnipresence of recording devices and ways to share digital information. So today, your own bad moment can become permanently attached to you. It can go viral. And so, despite a lifetime of almost always doing the right thing, this one bad moment becomes the stain that never goes away.

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Actor Christian Bale exploded on the set of Terminator 4, and his tirade has gone viral. The rant occurred in front of a small audience. But the recording has been shared millions of times. On YouTube, you can hear mashups of the rant with dance music and Dora the Explorer. There are currently about 40 videos featuring the profanity-laced rant. One has more than 2,320,000 page views.
“Christian Bale? Isn’t he that spoiled hothead? Oh, and I think he acted in some movies, too.”
Bale is not alone. Michael Richards had his bad moment. So did Michael Phelps. The pace of these moments seems to be accelerating. A-Rod lies about steroid use. Chris Brown may have assaulted his girlfriend, pop star Rihanna. Squeaky-clean Disney actress/singer Miley Cyrus appears to mock Asians. And that’s just from the past few days!
So please, be careful out there. And more importantly: be good. It is true: your true character is revealed by your behavior when you think no one is watching. 
A more difficult issue that deserves further discussion: forgiveness. As a culture, how can we forgive people that we really don’t know? The viral qualities of a bad moment are far more powerful than those of atonement.

Presidential spokespeople: is there a handbook?

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No wonder reporters don’t like spokespeople! Evasion, redirection, and just plain sucking up to reporters, straight from the playbook of how to be a lousy spokesperson (the good stuff starts at about 3:50 in on the clip).

Blagojevich: you just can’t look away

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Being a liar is probably the worst sin from a public relations perspective. But right next to lying is hubris, the notion that the rules don’t apply to you, that your $#*t don’t stink, that you can get away with something wrong through the sheer force of confidence.
Hubris is alive and well in government and business all across the world. Take a seasoned CEO with lots of power and money, stir in a cadre of “yes men,” and it will grow like bacteria in a petri dish. You’ve probably seen it at some place where you work. If you were lucky, you got out alive.
Occasionally, however, you get a special case, in which there’s a complete disconnect between bending the rules to suit your goals and totally smashing them. Like when 1988 Presidential hopeful Gary Hart, who was suspected of being a womanizer, said to the media, “go ahead, follow me.” (they found him on a yacht named Monkey Business, engaged in … well, monkey business, with a young-woman-not-his-wife, Donna Rice). 
Like when OJ Simpson vowed to spend the rest of his life looking for the “real killer.” Or when John Edwards tried to soften the impact of his infidelity, claiming that his wife’s cancer was in remission at the time.
And who could forget Bill Clinton, saying directly to the camera, “I did not have sex with that woman.”
And now we’ve got Rod Blagojevich, the colorful governor of Illinois, about to stand trial for impeachment. We’ve all heard the tapes of his conspiracy to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, his plans for the op-ed page of the Chicago Tribune, and the cursing. Lots of cursing. That’s a mighty big hole to climb out of. 
But some people just don’t give up. They see insurmountable odds, and to then it’s just like walking across the street. Here’s some of that hubris:
That’s right, he’s comparing himself to Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
Now Blago is taking his story to the cable news and TV talk shows, sharing his story of persecution, how the trial is fixed, and tossing off bombs like Oprah Winfrey for Senator. The TV hosts share looks of mock concern, but they’re gleeful to join in this self-made execution. After all, it’s Blago’s words that will hang him, not theirs.
What’s the take-away for a public relations professional? All you can do is watch and wonder. And inoculate yourself – and your clients – from hubris. Remember that your deeds matter more than your words. And that cameras and microphones are everywhere; showing trumps telling.
We see a horrible accident in slow motion. Here’s what Blago sees:

Reputation management tools, free and paid

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There’s only one Internet, and that makes it easier to effectively track your brand’s reputation than ever before. Dan Schwabel takes a look at free tools for online reputation management in this article; this may be all the information you need. But if you’re seeking enterprise-level support, here’s Dan’s rundown on paid tools, too. Alternately, you could hire a pro like Katie Payne. As Katie says, “if you treasure it, you must measure it.”

Protect your company from online identity theft

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photo courtesy of Giant Ginkgo

Last week was pretty good for Illuminati Karate, a web
developer in Raleigh, North Carolina. The company snapped up an expired web domain
for $10 and resold it for a profit of $34,990.

The
domain? GeorgeWBushLibrary.com. The library’s online vendor, Yuma Solutions,
carelessly let the domain expire. And Yuma should have known better. It
initially bought the domain for $3,000 – from yet another squatter.

 Welcome
to the wild world of online identity, where seemingly anyone can appropriate a brand’s
name. Don’t think it can happen to your company? Consider the threats:

• Cybersquatting, which occurs when
someone purchases a domain that points to your brand, such as the example above.
While there are laws against cybersquatting, it can be expensive and time
consuming to win. And the so-called squatter may have a legitimate right to the
name. In the early days of the Internet, a jazz club in New York called The
Blue Note was outraged to discover that someone had already purchased the
domain thebluenote.com. The owner, a music club in Columbia, Missouri, felt it
had a legitimate right to the name. It, too, was The Blue Note. The New York
club had to take legal action in Missouri, where it lost.

• Typosquatting, in which
competitors purchase domains that are similar to a legitimate one in order to
redirect traffic. For example, you could purchase goggle.com and receive a fair
number of visits from sloppy typists who meant to do a Google search.

• Phishing, in which a malicious
web site poses as a well-established brand and solicits personal information. Phishing
schemes typically target companies with online ecommerce, such as banks and
credit card companies.

• Brandjacking, in which someone
poses as your company in any online exchange. This can include popular social
networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Not long ago, a woman calling
herself Janet set up the account ExxonMobilCorp on the Twitter microblogging
site. She answered questions and shared expertise about her company, including
the observation that the Exxon Valdez was not one of the worst 10 oil spills.
The problem? Janet was not an ExxonMobil employee. While her account has been
shut down, to this day no one knows who she was.

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